


Functional Modalities of Videocalling and Progeny

by imagined_melody



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Parents, M/M, Post-Canon, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:27:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27294916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imagined_melody/pseuds/imagined_melody
Summary: Or: How to use Zoom when your two-year-old daughter won't stop interrupting your video calls. A story in four scenes.
Relationships: Troy Barnes/Abed Nadir
Comments: 27
Kudos: 120





	Functional Modalities of Videocalling and Progeny

**Author's Note:**

> All credit for the name of Troy and Abed's child goes to Cherie (biggod on AO3), who picked this name for their fic. I couldn't think of a better name for her, and I think it's because there isn't one. <3
> 
> FYI, there's no direct mention of Covid-19 in this fic, but it's kind of implied in the first 2 sections that Abed may be working from home because his set is closed down due to the pandemic. It's vague enough that you could easily pretend it was something else, though, if you like. Other than that detail connecting parts 1 and 2, these can function completely independently of one another, since no particular time is specified for any of them.

**One.**

Abed is thirty minutes into a producer’s meeting video call for the show they’ve just gotten into development when a piercing cry resounds throughout the apartment. It’s far enough away, through Abed’s mostly-closed door, that it doesn’t register loudly enough to interrupt the meeting, but Abed mutes himself anyway. If he’s learned anything as a parent, it’s that oftentimes one loud noise is followed by several more.

Sure enough, the crying gets steadily closer and closer, until out of his peripheral vision he sees his office door nudge open and a tiny, tear-streaked face poking through. Abed turns away from his computer to face her. “Hey, Leia,” he murmurs, stretching out his hands a little and letting her toddle towards him. “Where’s Papa? What happened?”

Leia climbs ungracefully into his lap, still sobbing a little. She tries to answer, but as often happens when she cries, her distressed babbling is barely comprehensible. Abed is about to get up and look for Troy when he hears hurried footsteps and the man himself appears at the door. 

“Sorry,” he says in a loud whisper, as though trying not to interrupt—even though there was no way Abed wouldn’t have muted his sound by now. “She closed a cabinet door with her hand still inside it and it hurt her fingers, so she stepped back and hit the tray table and fell on her butt, and her cereal spilled everywhere. I had to choose between going to her or cleaning up the mess first, and I didn’t want her to slip and fall on it, so…” He trails off, still looking a little harried, and runs a hand across the baby’s head, thumbing through the tear tracks under her eyes. 

Abed gathers Leia closer and leans in to press a dry, quick kiss to Troy’s lips. It soothes a little of the worried look out of his eyes. “Did you hurt your fingers, lovebug?” he says, looking directly into her still-watery eyes. “Which hand, can you show me?” Leia coughs out a little sob and holds out her right hand, which is indeed a little pink at the tips of the fingers. Abed takes it in his own and presses a series of rapid butterfly kisses to it. Her crying slows a little and she doesn’t make any sounds of increased pain, but Abed whispers to Troy, “Better ice it just to be sure.”

Troy taps Leia’s chin with his finger. “Hey baby, you wanna go get an ice cup and play with it?” She nods, still looking a little watery, and reaches out her arms for Troy to lift her out of Abed’s hold. Abed can’t keep the fond smile off his face. Troy’s idea to give her a cup of ice is the perfect idea: between sticking her hand in to play with the cubes and the sensory stimulation of shaking it, her fingers will be numb and her mind distracted in no time.

He’s still staring towards the door, watching the two of them go down the hall chattering happily, when he hears his name being mentioned. 

“I say if Abed doesn’t snap out of it, I get to change whatever I want in reshoots,” his assistant director Kat says, giggling. 

Abed is back in his seat in a flash. “Not so fast, Ignacio-Lopez,” he says, and the meeting takes off at full speed again.

\---

**Two.**

In January, Abed’s studio clears them to start filming, and suddenly Troy is the only stay-at-home dad again. He quickly discovers that not all of his work calls can coincide with Leia’s naps; more often than not, she is in her playpen or toddling around next to him while he talks. It works most of the time. She’s a good kid, inquisitive but self-sufficient, and as long as she’s within either his eyeline or the camera’s reach, he can keep an eye on her fairly easily. 

The problem is that she’s needier, now that she’s only got one parent around. She wants Troy’s attention _all the time_ : wants him to play toys with her, to talk to her—and on this particular day, she is _very_ interested in getting him to cuddle her. After her third attempt to climb, noisily chattering, into his lap, Troy bends down and lifts her up. He wraps his arms around her and hopes getting to sit with him soothes her enough that she calms down and he can focus on his meeting with Pierce’s board of trustees.

But unfortunately, Leia is officially at the stage where her vocabulary, in the last few months, has exploded. And that, combined with her natural curiosity, means that now that she can see what’s on his screen, she can’t stop identifying _absolutely everything_.

She squirms forward, pointing at the square on the screen. “Cup,” she says, and Troy gently lowers her hand and murmurs, “Yes baby, cup, that’s a coffee mug,” and turns his attention back to the meeting. He doesn’t want to mute himself—he’s a major shareholder, he needs to be able to chime in.

The screen switches to another person, a woman with a pot full of violet geraniums behind her, and Leia leans in and says “Purple!”, trying to touch the flowers through the screen. He pulls her back towards him again, strokes a hand through her hair, gives her a spare crayon and a piece of printer paper to keep her occupied. But she is undeterred.

She tries to count the number of Zoom participant boxes on the screen. She drums her feet on the seat of Troy’s swivel chair, and the palms of her hands on the desk. A trustee picks up a binder, and she points and says “Book” directly into Troy’s ear. Troy picks up a pencil to write something down, and Leia tries to grab it from his hand. 

Troy is finally about to get his phone and put on a kid’s show on YouTube, just to keep Leia’s attention on something else. He hates these meetings, but they’re the only work he doesn’t get to choose. He just needs to keep her busy long enough to get through it. And it almost works.

But then, something small and fluffy moves into frame in one of the boxes, and at the top of her lungs Leia squeals “CAT!!!!!”

Troy has to mute himself, laughing, after that.

\---

**Three.**

It’s a bad day.

It’s a bad day, so Abed has been spending most of it alone, in the guest bedroom that they keep made up in case of surprise visitors and days like this one. He woke up tense and agitated, his senses all misfiring and his tolerance of noise and social interaction threadbare. He’d spent the entire day alternating between lying curled up in bed, underneath his weighted blanket, and moving around the room restlessly, trying to give himself enough movement to quiet the energy vibrating through his body.

It’s a bad day, and Abed hates bad days. He’s always hated them, but so much more now that he’s a parent: because he can’t _be_ a parent, not really, on his bad days. He goes into the spare room and shuts the door, and the sounds of Leia and Troy going about their day are muffled just enough that he can ignore them. He knows Troy purposefully keeps Leia away on those days. It makes him feel awful, guilty, because this is his husband and his baby girl and he _should be there_.

But he knows that if he goes out and tries to do things as normal, he’ll end the day in a meltdown. And as much as it pains him to seclude himself from the people he loves, he also doesn’t want them to see him like _that_. Leia is too little to understand, still, and she doesn’t always remember or understand boundaries yet. He doesn’t want to alarm her: or worse, get angry or upset when she accidentally does something that sets him off and sends him spiralling. This room is set up to be exactly what he needs when he has a bad day; they made sure of that, the first time this happened when Leia was a baby and they needed it. So he stays in here, picking at the food Troy brings and trying to cling to whatever sense of stability he possibly can.

It’s nighttime now. Leia has been put to bed an hour or so before, and Troy is out in the living room, still giving Abed space, waiting for Abed to come out and find him when he’s ready. Now that the house is settled and quiet, he’s left the door to the guest room open just a crack. 

It’s a bad day, and Abed has finally gotten to the point where he can tolerate a little bit of social contact. So he wraps himself up tight like a burrito, sits down on the floor by the bed with his laptop in front of him, and sends a video call request to Jeff.

Jeff sees Abed’s tired, worried eyes and the weighted blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and he doesn’t say another word for the first few minutes of the call. Instead, he turns on the TV, navigates to Netflix, scrolls through his queue until he finds what he’s looking for: _Back to the Future_. One of Abed’s comfort movies. Finally, he looks over at Abed and asks, “You ready?”

Abed nods, not knowing whether words would come out of his mouth yet if he tried to speak. Despite how guilty he feels on bad days, he feels profoundly grateful now: for Troy, taking on the full responsibility of caring for Leia when Abed feels this way, and for Jeff who knows exactly what to do when Abed calls him at the end of days like these. Jeff puts on one of the movies that Abed finds soothing—they have a list, hashed out years ago now—and then sits down in his chair, the TV behind him so that Abed can see and hear both the screen and Jeff himself. Then he keeps doing whatever he was doing before Abed called: grading papers (because he assigns actual papers now, and teaches real classes), reading, eating dinner. Abed can watch the TV through the screen until he’s ready to talk—until he’s ready to go out to Troy and rejoin the world.

Marty McFly has just run into the younger version of his dad in the diner when the door behind Abed creaks further open. At first he thinks it’s Troy checking in on him, but when he glances behind himself he doesn’t see anyone’s face until he looks down, and catches a small sleepy figure slipping through the door. 

“Hey baby,” he whispers; his voice is hoarse with disuse, and he cringes at how it sounds. Leia doesn’t look distressed, just tired. She rubs a hand over her eye and shuffles over to where Abed is sitting, then climbs straight into his lap and burrows her tiny warm body into his chest. Abed watches, stunned and full of love, as her eyes fall closed again and she drifts immediately back to sleep in his arms. 

He looks up and sees Jeff looking at them with undisguised affection. “She’s beautiful,” Jeff murmurs. 

Abed strokes a feather-light finger across her soft, chubby cheek. He can feel the contentment seeping from every point where he’s touching Leia, all the way down to his bones. His daughter hadn’t been crying like she’d had a nightmare; she probably wasn’t even awake enough to know why she’d gotten out of bed, if he’d asked. She just missed him, so she woke up and came to find him. When she was younger, she used to do this more often—she would wake up in the middle of the night, toddle sleepily into his and Troy’s bedroom on her wobbly little baby legs, and tug on the blanket until one of them lifted her onto the mattress and let her sleep between them. 

“She’s growing up so fast,” he whispers to Jeff, and all of a sudden it loosens the stranglehold his heart has been trapped in all day. The words pour out of him: he keeps his voice quiet, but he tells Jeff about all the milestones Leia has reached since the last time he visited, the funny things she’s said and the little ways she’s changing, how she’s a little bit older every day now. How he can’t stop noticing it.

Finally, the door pushes open again. It’s Troy, drawn in by the sound of Abed’s voice. He greets Jeff, and then rubs a hand up Abed’s forehead and through his hair. The touch no longer sends his nerves firing erratically; now it feels comforting, in a way that makes every muscle in his body relax. “Time for bed,” Troy murmurs, and he tilts his head toward Leia, but he means Abed too.

Abed can already feel his eyes wanting to close, a little. They haven’t even gotten to the final scenes on the clock tower in the movie, yet, but exhaustion is overtaking him fast. He turns to back to the screen, to Jeff, who is smiling at him. “Go to sleep,” he says, then gestures to the movie. Marty is just climbing onstage and picking up the guitar to play ‘Johnny B Goode.’. “You know this is my favorite part.”

Troy gets a cozy blanket, lifts Leia out of Abed’s arms and nestles her in it as he carries her back to her room. When he comes back into the doorway, he’s holding open another soft flannel throw, an earnest expression on his face. “You ready?” he whispers.

Abed stands up. His legs are a little shaky after so long sitting on the floor. He shuffles over so that Troy can drape it around him, and then wraps his own arms around Troy and sighs into his chest. Troy gathers him close and scratches his fingers through Abed’s hair. 

“Goodnight Jeff,” Abed says drowsily, to the computer screen he’s relocated to the guest bed.

Troy echoes, “Goodnight Jeff,” and Jeff winks and says “Goodnight, Angels.” The reference makes Abed smile, just like he knew it would.

When Troy comes back from putting Abed to bed, Jeff is so immersed in the movie he doesn’t even notice him ending the call.

\---

**Four.**

Troy is in the kitchen making himself a snack when he gets a text from Annie. _Hey, where are you?_

It’s five minutes before 7:00 at night, and he has a video call with Annie at 7. He frowns idly while he leans against the fridge. _Still getting ready. Why_

_Because your very smart daughter and I are having a great conversation right now_

Troy’s frown deepens, and then he lets the plastic plate clatter to the counter as he mutters “Oh shit” and walks as fast as he can into the office at the corner of the hall. His jaw drops when he takes in the sight before him, all at once. Leia has scrambled her way into the chair and managed to click on the Zoom link in Annie’s email, and now she’s chattering away at the screen. 

For a moment, Troy’s mind is flooded with worst-case scenarios as he imagines how this could have gone: how Leia could have hit her head climbing onto the chair, or clicked on a link that took her someplace unsafe, or damaged the computer in some way. But then he gathers himself in almost the same instant, remembering what his therapist has told him time and time again: _you can’t worse-case-scenario your way through everything_. And he tells himself, _all those things could have happened, but none of them did_.

He walks over to the computer and scoops his daughter up, flipping her sideways under his arm until she squeals and then settling her down in the chair with him. “I’m sorry!” he says, and for all his worry, when he laughs now it comes out genuine. He turns to Leia. “Usually when we click on links on papa’s computer, it takes us to sing-along videos on YouTube, doesn’t it?” Leia nods and babbles a little, a rambling sentence, but he hears the word _Annie_ in it and smiles. “Yeah, but this time you found Annie! Good job!”

She claps a little, absently, at hearing the validation; Troy holds out his hand with the palm facing her and she smacks it with her own in a high-five. Grinning now, Troy turns back to the computer—and his breath stops in his chest. Because for the first time now, he’s looking at the screen in full: and he realizes it’s not just Annie on the call, like he’d expected. Everyone is there, in their own little boxes: Jeff and Britta, Shirley, Annie, even Frankie (who he’d met when he and Abed went back to Greendale for what Dean Pelton arbitrarily declared their “seven-year reunion”). 

“Happy birthday, Troy!” Annie says, and all the rest of them shout it after her in a haphazard chorus. Troy feels tears coming to his eyes immediately, and he does nothing to hold it back; he’s long ago ceased being ashamed of his tendency to tear up at everything. ( _I think we both know I’m really the one with the ‘wild emotionality,’_ Troy had said to Abed once, shortly after their reunion, and Abed had kissed the top of his head and murmured, _Not if you could see what’s in my heart_.) Immediately, he knows Abed was behind this. Abed, who had to be away on location this weekend. Abed, who wouldn’t let Troy and Leia come because he thought it would disrupt her life too much to spend four months in a new place. Abed, who was determined not to let Troy spend his birthday alone.

Abed, who’s not one of the people on this video call right now.

He’s no sooner thinking it than he hears the quiet click of the front door locking, followed by a shuffling sound in the hall. The Zoom call is a chaotic jumble of sound—everyone talking at once—and Britta is trying to get Troy’s attention, but nothing right now could pull his focus away from what he heard behind him. He turns a quarter of the way around in his swivel chair, breath caught in his throat.

When Abed appears in the doorway, he seems thrown off to find Troy already looking at him. He blinks at Troy for a second. “How’d you know?” he finally says, but the corner of his mouth is turning up in a warm smile.

Leia is already wiggling to try to get out of his lap and over to Abed, so Troy lowers her to the floor and then gets up. “We didn’t tell him!” Annie is shouting from the computer. Troy ducks his head and laughs. His legs feel a little unsteady.

“How long?” he asks, thinking _If you say you’re only here for a day, I might cry again._

Abed gives him one of his gentle, private smiles. “Three days,” he says. He steps a little closer. In his offhanded, deadpan voice, he adds, “Now I _know_ you don’t check our bank statements often enough, or you would have seen me buying the plane ticket.”

Troy’s kiss, in clear view of a screen full of their cheering friends, cuts off whatever else Abed was going to say.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at [imaginedmelody](http://imaginedmelody.tumblr.com)! If you like people who post a little bit of absolutely everything, my tumblr is probably the place for you.


End file.
